The Undead Pool (34 page)

Horrified, I scrambled to put the chair between us. Holy crap, it was like the night of the living dead in my living room! Jenks was on my shoulder, and Bis flew into the rafters, hissing.

“Rachel?” Ivy said, eyes black and freaking out. “Where did he come from?”

I'd kicked the Goddess out of my mind. Apparently she'd found another, one who couldn't stop her, and jumped it here. “Ah, the morgue? I think it's okay,” I said, coming out from behind my chair. Landon was no use, huddled as if he'd never seen a zombie before. Hell, I knew I hadn't, but I was used to things like this. Leaning over the boy, I carefully flipped him over and stared at his unseeing eyes.
Sort of.

“I think she thinks I'm one of her mystics,” I said, and the boy stared sightlessly at me. Either she didn't know how to work the eyes, or the optic nerve was already dead.

“You are,” the boy said, gaze vacant. “You're my thought. Come home.”

Okay, I could handle this, and I moved so that his eyes might find mine. “I'm not,” I said, creeping out. “My aura is the same is all. Listen. Your mystics slipping from my line are damaging reality. Can you not use that line for a while?”

“Line?” the boy said, his motions to try to get up faltering to nothing. His eyes met mine, and I froze, pulse hammering. “You're not my dream,” he said suddenly, and Landon began chanting half under his breath. He sounded terrified. I knew I wasn't all that happy. “You're the solid everything lives within. What are you?”

“Rache!” Jenks exclaimed, and my eyes widened as the Goddess suddenly tried to slip into my thoughts again. Breath hissing, I bubbled myself, shifting my aura, then shifting it again. If not for my practice holding my own against demons, I might have been lost.
No!
I demanded, and my face burned where Jenks's dust touched me as I felt her soak into me, layer by layer, as if absorbing the chemicals and synapses in my brain and reading them like memory.
I'm not you! I'm Rachel. Get out!

Again I shoved her away, and panting, I stood in the middle of the sanctuary, shaking. Landon was crouched by the boy at my feet, and he looked up as I took a gasping breath of air.

“Who is that?” I said, and he shrugged.

“She forgot to breathe for him,” he said. “And with a lack of oxygen, the biological processes fall apart very fast under motion. When the brain quits functioning completely, she can't stay.”

“Then it's over?” Jenks said from beside Bis in the rafters. The gargoyle looked totally freaked out, a pale white beside Jenks's green dust.

“Good.” Ivy cracked her knuckles, her eyes dark and her fear of the dead obvious. “Get out.”

But a jerk on the ley line brought my head up, and I dropped back as a man in a hospital gown was suddenly standing in my church.

“You're not singular,” the man said, clearly more animate than the boy, making me wonder if he had perhaps just died and he had a larger number of neurons and synapses still working. “You are a complicated dream . . .”

“Tink's little pink dildo! We got us another one, Rache!”

“I am not a dream!” I shouted, amazed at how quickly my horror could turn to annoyance, and I swear the Goddess almost focused on me. “I'm another entity. I'm . . . a singular,” I said, trying to use words she might understand. “I exist in the mass that creates spaces. We all do. Now will you listen to me? Someone is stealing your thoughts. I'm trying to help.”

The man listed as he shambled forward. “They're stealing me?” she said, the first hints of real emotion crossing her, and Landon backed to the hallway at the end of the church. “Errant dreams are holding them?” I backed up too as the dead man suddenly lost control of his feet and fell to his knees. “They take them for their own? They are mine! Mine!”

She was angry again. I was losing what little ground I'd gained. “If you could—”

“You know where my thoughts are.” The man's head slumped, and he fell forward, his body shutting down. “I see it in you, errant singular,” she said, facedown on the floor.

Taken aback, I hesitated and looked at Ivy. It was hard to be afraid of something that kept falling down.

“You're complex,” the Goddess said, face still planted in the floor, and Jenks dropped down, his dust glowing like a second aura. “How do you not become? Perhaps you exist. Perhaps not. You will be my thought. My thought with . . . independent movement in the mass between spaces.”

Huh?

“You need direction,” she added, and the man collapsed, the strings utterly cut.

No!
I screamed, but that fast, she had me, the Goddess learning the electrical impulses of my body in a flash of insight. My eyes flew open, and I felt a surge of shock and pleasure as she saw the world through me, her first spike of confusion vanishing as she dipped through my brain and found out how to make sense of it, learning what a corpse could never teach her. She was in my soul, wild, bright, dark, all things.

“Rachel?” Ivy said, squinting at me in concern. Jenks watched, horrified, as she iced through me, seeing the world through her thousand eyes. I opened my mouth to speak, but the Goddess's attention was upon the pixies as she calculated the flow of dust by taking in the air currents and heat patterns. Struggling, I tried again. Landon had crept back out of the hallway, smiling wickedly. Feeling my surge of anger, the Goddess fixed on him.

“You're a wicked trickster,” I said, but it was the Goddess speaking, and Jenks moaned. Through her, I could see Landon's betrayal, see his thoughts like the aura spilling from his soul. It had been my hair in the charm. He'd done this knowing she'd eventually take me over, destroy me like the splinter had destroyed Bancroft.
He'd convinced Bancroft to do this same thing,
I thought, remembering that same glint of satisfaction in him at the top of the FIB building.
He murdered Bancroft as surely as if he had slit his throat.
God, I had been stupid!

It was Landon, I suddenly realized. Landon was the one helping the Free Vampires eliminate the undead. Landon was a master of wild magic, and he was using them to kill all the master vampires. Bancroft. Trent. All of us were pawns in his game.

“Rachel?”

But a pawn could become a queen if she reached the end and came back again.

Wavering slightly, I turned to Ivy, feeling the Goddess's attention fracture a hundred different directions to leave me free to breathe and speak. “Um, maybe?” I whispered.

Jenks darted up, frantic. “Rache, she's in you!” he said. “Kick her out!”

But I couldn't. She had dug her claws in deep, enjoying seeing mass in a way she never dreamed was real.

You are as I,
she thought
. But so small. A single identity that holds thousands of thoughts instead of a thousand thoughts holding a single identity. Mass can't do this.

Her grip on me loosened more, and I took a breath, then another. Jenks's wings clattered, and I looked at my hands. They were shaking, but I felt the awe of the Goddess in me. They were beautiful in structure, diverse in intent. I'd never noticed.

“I don't believe it,” Landon said, and my head snapped up. His hatred was etched into his features, and I felt a tiny shock as the Goddess only now linked the facial expression to the emotion. He'd expected me to be taken as Bancroft had been. He'd expected me to be snuffed, destroyed, my single identity holding a thousand thoughts ended—and that pissed her off.

“You're not wicked. You are ill,” the Goddess said through me.

He opened his mouth, and I smacked him.

My hand met his face in a resounding crack. A burst of ever-after struck him, and he was flung backward, slamming into the wall between two stained-glass windows.

Bis dropped down to Ivy, and Jenks took to the air. I knew my aura was wrong. I couldn't feel Bis anymore. Unable to stop, I walked to Landon cowering under a window. The Goddess's eyes were whirling in me, in the line, in the spaces between. The feel of the wood against my feet was exhilarating, and I could feel the pressures shift as my weight was pulled into the earth. It was glorious, and only a fraction of the Goddess's eyes were on Landon as he gaped at us.

Us?
the Goddess thought, a fragment of her awareness seeming to enfold upon itself at the concept of two individuals acting as one.

“You are an ugly dream that should be dreamed no more,” I said, then cocked my head, delighting in the sound of my voice coming back from the rafters.
Like errant thoughts,
the Goddess mused, finding common ground in how sound moved between empty space and solids.

“Rachel, no!” Jenks cried out as I reached for Landon, and I managed to pull my hand back from the Goddess's reach to throttle him. “Please, let her go,” he pleaded as he hovered before me.

“You are a worthy dream,” the Goddess said to Jenks, forgetting Landon as I turned to Ivy. She was crying, and I'd never seen her so beautiful. “And you,” the Goddess said through me, and Ivy blinked fast, catching back a sob. “Us. I like us,” the Goddess said aloud, and I felt a smile grow.

“You're a trickster singular, Rachel Morgan,” the Goddess whispered aloud so she could hear her words come back from the ceiling. I was starting to sound crazy, and Bis had gone chalk white. “Your purpose is to make balance. Mass has meaning through you. I will dream this further and will find my errant thoughts.”

No!
I thought. But it was too late, and the Goddess had yanked not only my thoughts but my body into the line.

Suddenly I existed only as a thought, one eye among thousands, but a thought that could think a thousand more, unique and alone, able to be I, and us, and we. Around me was the Goddess, her trickster thoughts aligning within me. She knew how to end dreams that were unworthy of being dreamed.

She'd let me help.

Nineteen

I
was both in the ley line and not, and there was no protection bubble to mute the sensation of energy flowing through the spaces in me. Around me were the collective thoughts of the Goddess, emotion being the easiest thing to comprehend. Oh, I could hear her thoughts, thousands of them all at the same time fluttering at the edges like purple wings, but comprehending a single voice was like picking out a single note in a full orchestra. Emotions were easier, broader sweeps of feeling—and most of the Goddess was pissed.

But parts of her are frightened,
I thought as a blossoming of her fear gathered closer to me as if drawn by my own unease. Suddenly it became easier to pick out single frightened thoughts, mystics perhaps, fragments of a collective mind. Doubt, fear, anger, they whispered until I felt sorry for her.

Like a failing tide, the Goddess's fear fell away, replaced by her own thoughts of compassion for the small dreams that she'd been dreaming, lost and alone. The sudden switch from fear to compassion was a shock, and as soon as I realized it, her compassion fell away, replaced by the Goddess's own thoughts of amazement that something could exist outside of her, that unlivable mass had found a way to support independent thought.

Suddenly I realized I was attracting the parts of her that resonated with my current mood. The thought to use that to my advantage crossed me, and I wavered as the Goddess's own crafty thoughts of trickster wish fulfillment coated me in an unreal slurry. Reeling, I felt as if I was caught in a roller-coaster nightmare and couldn't get out. It was like trying to walk through a morass where the ground kept shifting.

Here!
the Goddess thought suddenly, and when her eyes turned from me, I clawed my awareness out from under it all.
My thoughts!

But the Goddess's elation too soon mutated into confusion.
They can't hear me,
rose a thousand laments.
They can't hear me!

Struggling to think through her noise, I scraped together the thinning remnants of the Goddess's resolve. She wasn't thinking three dimensionally, but four.
I need to have mass,
I said, trying to impress upon her that her straying thoughts couldn't hear her because they weren't in space, but mass.
We have to leave the line as they did.

Line, line,
she lamented.
There is no line, there is only . . .

I shifted my aura and left the line, praying we weren't underground. The Goddess felt me slip from her, and I shuddered as little claws of thought dug into my awareness. With a wrench that tore me, I felt her extrapolate from where I was, modulate what I could not, and as easy as breathing, felt myself become solid. Sort of. She was with me still, in the spaces inside me.

Surprise, elation, and understanding filled her, spilling over into me.
There is a line,
the Goddess thought, her conviction growing as she saw, understood, and accepted. And then she began to play with it, shifting my aura in and out, tasting what it was like to go from solid to thought, and back to solid.

Enough!
I shouted. Heart pounding and lungs starved for air, I phased back into existence, the Goddess firmly embedded within me as I dropped to one knee. My hands clenched into a thick, yellow shag carpet. It was the best feeling ever, even if it was matted, and I took a moment to simply breathe. I had a tiger by the tail, and I didn't know if I could survive a thousand thoughts-not-mine racing through me.

Not so much!
I begged her.
Fewer thoughts. I can't . . . carry all of you . . . at once.

Denial met me, and I stared at the carpet, demanding that she look at it, absorb its intricacies of chaos and how they manipulated the mass around space with color and texture.

A huge chunk of her finally did, finding delight in it, and I could breathe. My connection to the ley line was unbreakable, and it flowed through me with the roar of a fire. I could hear the sound of clicking keys and low, muted voices. I stared at my sock foot, and the Goddess thought it was amazing how something solid was used to cover living mass.
I am in a mass that is sentient,
she thought.
Impossible. Only energy can be sentient
.

“Oh my God!” someone exclaimed, and the clicking of keys stopped.

I wanted to look up, but I was afraid to move, and I wiggled my big toe.

“Ah, Ayer?” a masculine voice said, and I cringed.

“What the hell?” Ayer said, and I wrestled for more control, forcing the Goddess into the background where she focused on my lungs and the bits of matter I needed in order to keep from dying and snuffing my thoughts born from organized mass. After the two corpses in my front living room, I thought it might be important.

Living, dying, so small a shift, so big a difference And it hinges on . . . this little bit of mass?
she thought, only now understanding why her previous vessels kept failing her.

“Yeah,” I whispered, glad I had enough command to speak again as I slowly pulled control of my body back to me.

“Nothing registered on the auratoscope, Ayer. She just . . . appeared.”

“That tricky elf came through,” he said, and I got my head up, my attention flitting briefly over the two banks of electronic equipment staffed by men and women in military garb before going to the dark windows. I was in a large, high-ceilinged living room, an entire wall of windows looking out over the Hollows, the Ohio River, and Cincinnati beyond. The land spilled out before me, breathtakingly beautiful with the lights and fires of the living. Fifty years ago, it had been prime real estate. Not so much anymore, being too far from the city center and in the wilds.

The Goddess fastened on it, drawing understanding from me as I filled in the blanks of what she was seeing. Shag carpet, sunken living room, and top-of-the-line electronics that didn't go with the seventies vibe the sunken living room and fire pit were giving me. And of course, the Free Vampires playing army.

New concepts spilled through the Goddess as I took control and rose, thoughts of balance and mass and the sensation of gravity—an unseen presence that grew from mass itself. Heart pounding, I stood facing them, my fear muting to anger as the Goddess gathered her rage at her missing thoughts.

“I don't believe it,” Ayer said, motioning at two men at the outskirts. “Take her.”

I remained still as they reached for their weapons and made an uneasy semicircle around me. I didn't really care.
Like they could hold me?
I thought, the Goddess agreeing. “You might want to rethink this,” I said, and Ayer blinked in surprise. His eyes were so much like Kisten's it hurt.

“Sir, she's not dead,” a frightened man in fatigues and a buzz cut said as he held a readout to Ayer. “She's coated in them,” he whispered, eyes going black. “What do you want to do?”

Ayer looked down, then back to me. “Landon said the Goddess can't inhabit the living, only the dead. Get me a different reading. That's impossible.”

“No, just really uncomfortable,” I said, squinting at the ceiling. “She's focused on the light photons right now, but I suggest you give her the mystics you've captured.”

“She?” Ayer waved the men to stand down. Reluctantly they did. “My God, you didn't go crazy. She's in there? With you?”

His avarice caught the Goddess's attention, and together we focused on him, comparing the electricity in the wires in the walls to the electricity in his brain, all jumping about in a chaotic perfection. “Singular who stole my thoughts,” I said, but it was the Goddess speaking through me. “Give them back.” My hand went out palm up, the Goddess having sifted through my thoughts and finding the gesture appropriate.

Shock crossed him, and he backed up a graceful step. We breathed in the scent of frightened vampire, relishing the way it made our skin sparkle like the space between mass.

“Yes, she talks,” I said, wishing I could force her to put my hand down, but I was picking my battles and was glad I had control of my mouth. “Go on. Explain to her why you're stealing her thoughts. I'm curious myself.”

Suddenly I was moving forward, struggling for control. “I did not dream you,” the Goddess said through me, my accent unchanged, but her anger now coloring it. “You're therefore singular. And fragile.”

Weapons were cocking, and fear iced through me.
Stop!
I demanded.
I'm fragile too!
And she did, though I don't know why. Maybe my fear pulled all hers together to one spot and made the danger more real.

“Singular?” Ayer took another readout from a white-faced woman with a gun on her hip. The Goddess tasted my fear, weighed it against her own, and dismissed it as incidental.
How can a small bit of mass projected from a dead object end you?
she wondered, but doubt seeped into her confidence when she dug deeper and found the answer.

“Singular,” I echoed, answering Ayer. “As in not a part of her.” But the Goddess's outrage was growing. “Ah, I suggest you let them go!” I said, gaining a smidgen of control as I took another unwilling step toward him. “Please!”

“Ayer!” someone shouted as I tried to stay still and failed. “What do you want us to do!”

“Stand down!” he shouted, backing up out of my reach. “I want her alive!”

Swell, he wants me alive?
“Listen to me,” I said as I got my feet to stop moving. “I know you think Landon is helping you, but once the masters are dead, he's going to turn on you. You've got to stop this. Now!”

Behind him, I saw uneasy glances and guilt, but Ayer studied me calmly, noting the Goddess inside. “I know Landon lies, but that doesn't mean he's not useful. My original aim was smaller. A personal choice limited to a building or a room. With his help?” he said, a graceful hand shifting to encompass the entire city. “We can end the suffering of all our people. I agree it's less than ideal right now, but as soon as all the masters die, the living will submit, faced with a true death and no second chances. Landon doesn't control us.
I
control us.”

Again there were downcast eyes. The Goddess saw it, and I told her what it meant. Ayer had gone beyond what his people had wanted. There was a schism. There was a chance. “Yeah?” I shuffled forward a step, trying not to. “What makes you so sure you can outfox him? He already set you up. Told the FIB it was you all along.”

Ayer smiled, beautifully oblivious. “He lost his faith, and without that, elves are easy to control. That, and he wants to see you dead.”

“My existence is singular,” the Goddess said through me, and Ayer's focus sharpened as he heard the difference. “I cannot die. I can only become. And you can't make me.”

“She's completely nuts!” someone whispered.

“No. She's got a god in her,” Ayer said tersely. “Are we in the green? Run it.”

I spun. The Goddess didn't understand my alarm as a man flicked a lever on a panel and the lights dimmed. Far away, I heard a thrum, and a thump shifted the air.

Elation not mine pulsed through me. It was the Goddess, and she strengthened inside me until I staggered and fell to a knee. It was her thoughts. Her missing self. She'd found them!

“No!” I cried out, even as she forced us upright and staggering to the center of the room before the windows, arms outstretched as she searched.

“Don't touch her!” Ayer bellowed, and I wrestled just enough control from the Goddess to make a circle. She was oblivious as bullets zinged and ricocheted.

“I said leave her alone!” Ayer screamed, yanking the weapon from the nearest man. “I will drop the next man who touches a trigger! Use the darts!”

The Goddess's dismay cascaded over me, heady and unending.
They refuse to become!
she wailed, and I floundered, trying to get her to listen to my one single thought that it was the machine that held them captive. Destroy the machine, and they'd be free.
Would I survive it?
I wondered, but the Goddess's grief was my entire existence, and I'd do anything to make it stop.

“The machine?” the Goddess exclaimed through me as she finally listened, and I felt ill with the sudden rise of emotion. “They're caught in the . . . In that?”

Together we looked at the machine, and with an odd twist, I felt myself see with her awareness, feeling the tiny space the machine created to hold thoughts born and existing in the space between. I stared at it, my awe coloring her outrage. It was a tiny bubble pulled out of time, created with wild magic and science. Landon had created a new ever-after, but one so small it could be lost on the head of a pin. It was all they could muster, but it was enough to hold a Goddess's thoughts.

“We're good!” someone shouted, and her outrage flamed as the Goddess finally realized what they'd done. She shook within me, and as I struggled to maintain the circle.
They're blind to me,
she thought.
I hear them singing, and they sing the wrong song.

“Release them!” I screamed, but I wasn't sure if it was me or the Goddess.

“Ready . . .” Ayer said as they backed up, and I saw the circle of wire they'd put about me. “Now!”

My eyes widened as a man at a bank of equipment shoved a thick lever up. Lights dimmed, and the thrum pounded through me. A scream ripped from my throat as a wave of pure wild magic cascaded from my soul to my fingers, outstretched in pain. It struck the machine full on, and I cowered inside as the Goddess stood firm, arcs of electricity dancing in the suddenly dark room, waves of black energy surging back and forth between the walls, now bowed out and cracking ominously.

And with a bang that echoed in my soul, the bubble of time popped.

No . . .
I thought as suddenly the air sparkled. Wild magic. It was everywhere, and a cloud of freed mystics hazed the air. I felt them inside me as I breathed, blinked them from my eyes like tears. But the Goddess gloried in them, her thoughts bright with power as she called them to her, waiting to bring them home to become with her again.